I’ll write a bit more about why I’m switching to Linux in the future, but for today I’m going to solve a problem with the tilde (~) key in ElementaryOS.

Out of the box with the Dvorak keyboard when you press the ~ key you actually get > which is not what you want. It means I can’t really type the root path to my Home directory easily.

It’s just a pain in the butt.

Since ElementaryOS is based on Ubuntu you’ll find a bunch of solutions out there. One that seems to work for many people, but not me is to use the following code in your /etc/rc.local file.

echo 0 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/iso_layout

As I said, that didn’t change anything for me in ElementaryOS. But there is still a solution.

You need to ‘switch’ keys 49 and 94 by setting the ‘badmap’ in the keyboard settings. Using the command below ‘fixes’ it but isn’t persistent in my experience.

setxkbmap -option apple:badmap

To make it persistent edit /etc/default/keyboard and set XKBOPTIONS="apple:badmap".

With this in hand on ElementaryOS or Ubuntu 16.04LTS you should be able to type your ~ key.

You can see the official bug here.